Authors: Harry Turtledove
She shivered a little and sighed when he nibbled the lobe of her ear. She wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t looking at anything; her eyes were shut tight. In a tiny voice, she said, “Please tell me you didn’t have this in mind when you asked me to come up here with you.”
“By the powers above, I didn’t!” Fernao exclaimed, more truthfully than not. “It just—happened.”
“It just—happened,” Pekka echoed. Her eyes were still closed, but she nodded once more and reached for him. If anything, her kiss was even more desperate than his.
She shivered again when he unbuttoned her tunic, and once more when his mouth descended on her left breast. He teased her nipple with lips and tongue. She pressed his head to her. Then, panting and laughing, she reached under his kilt.
When all her clothes lay scattered on the floor, Fernao wondered how he could ever have thought her scrawny. She was what she was—a Kuusaman woman, made as Kuusamans were. And … Not much later, he stopped thinking at all, but leaned on one elbow above her for a moment while he guided himself in. She let out a low, breathy moan and clasped him with arms and legs. She still kept her eyes shut tight.
He had to fight not to explode in the first instant. Once he managed that, once he found a rhythm that suited them both, he thought for a while that he could go on forever. But Pekka’s mounting excitement spurred him toward the end, too. She called out a name and gave a short, sharp cry of joy. Her nails scored his back. He gasped and shuddered and spent himself. Only afterwards did he notice the name she’d called wasn’t his.
He stroked her cheek. With a little luck, she hadn’t realized she’d cried her husband’s name, there in the moment when all thought fled. But she had. She jerked away from his gentle hand and burst into tears. “Leave me alone!” she said. “What have I done?”
The answer to that was only too obvious. Fernao didn’t point it out to her. He dressed quickly and hurried out of the chamber. Even though it was his, he fled it like an adulterer diving out a bedroom window when he heard footsteps on the stairs. He was halfway down the hall before he wondered what sort of rumors
that
would start.
Patrol. Somebody had to do it. Sidroc understood as much. The Unkerlanters had written the book on infiltration, written it and revised it several times. If you didn’t go prowling forth and find out what they were up to and hold them at arm’s length, you’d wake up one fine morning with them bellowing, “Urra!” from front, rear, and both flanks all at the same time.
But if you did go prowling forth, they were liable to kill you for your trouble. Patrols didn’t always come back. Sometimes they just vanished as if they’d never been. Sidroc was painfully aware of that. He tried to tiptoe through the woods of the eastern Duchy of Grelz. Somebody had to go out on patrol, aye. He wished he weren’t one of the somebodies.
He also wished he and his comrades from Plegmund’s Brigade didn’t have to rely on the guide who walked through the woods with them. Some Grelzer peasants hated King Swemmel and his inspectors and impressers worse than the Algarvians did. Others pretended to hate Swemmel so as to lure the redheads—and the Forthwegians who fought alongside them—to destruction. Finding out you’d trusted the wrong sort of guide was too apt to be the last discovery you ever made.
Sergeant Werferth spoke in Algarvian: “Where did you see these Unker-lanter soldiers?” Then he repeated the question in Forthwegian, which was at least related to the language spoken hereabouts.
“I see … by village,” the guide said in bad Algarvian, and pointed west and a little north. “Two companies, maybeso three.” He showed the numbers on his fingers to leave no room for error.
“Maybeso,” Ceorl jeered. “Maybeso you’re leading us into an ambush, eh?”
With a shrug, the guide answered, “You kill me then.”
“Let him alone, Ceorl,” Werferth said. “He’s supposed to be on our side, remember?”
“He’s supposed to be, aye,” Sidroc said. “But
is
he?” Ceorl looked at him in surprise; they seldom agreed about anything. Sidroc went on, “I don’t want him leading us down the primrose path, either, you know.”
He’d spoken Forthwegian. Sure enough, the local could follow bits of the language, for he said, “No primroses.” Then he said several other things in his own dialect of Unkerlanter. Sidroc got only fragments of that, but none of it sounded complimentary to King Swemmel. He kicked at the muddy pine needles underfoot. The guide would sound the same way no matter how he really felt about the King of Unkerlant.
“He knows this country better than we do,” Werferth said. “It’s his neck if the Unkerlanters catch him after he’s helped us.”
If he’s the straight goods,
Sidroc thought.
If he’s not…
If the guide wasn’t the straight goods, they could indeed avenge themselves upon him. That wasn’t likely to do them much good, though.
Off in the distance, a wolf howled. Sidroc hoped it was a wolf, anyhow. So did the Algarvian lieutenant heading up the patrol. He said, “Do they really let those cursed things run loose in this part of the world?”
“Aye,” the guide answered.
Sidroc wasn’t altogether sure why anyone let the Algarvian lieutenant run loose in this part of the world. Sidroc hadn’t seen his twentieth birthday yet, but he felt ten years older than the redhead. Even so, the Algarvian gave the orders, as if to proclaim that his folk were the conquerors, with the men of Plegmund’s Brigade only along for the ride.
If they ‘re the conquerors, how come they‘ve spent most of the past year retreating?
Sidroc wondered.
And what happens if they spend most of the next year retreating, too?
He didn’t want to dwell on that. One of the reasons he’d signed up for Plegmund’s Brigade was that the Algarvians had looked like world-beaters back in Forthweg. If the world was theirs, what better way to grab a chunk of it than fighting at their side?
He still couldn’t imagine the world belonging to the Unkerlanters. They were too dowdy for that to seem possible.
Another wolf howled, this one in the direction where the guide said the Unkerlanters were based. “I don’t like that,” Sergeant Werferth muttered.
“Why not?” The Algarvian lieutenant sounded curious. A bright child might have sounded the same way.
We don’t need a bright child leading our patrol,
Sidroc thought.
We need a nasty old veteran who knows what he’s doing and how to go about it.
But the young Algarvian was what they had.
Patiently, Werferth said, “Because it sounds like signal and answer, sir. If it is signal and answer, we’re liable to be walking into something we’d be better off missing.”
“Ah,” the lieutenant said, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. He swept off his hat and bowed to Werferth, so maybe it hadn’t. Sidroc sighed. If the lieutenant lived, he’d learn in a hurry. Fighting against the Unkerlanters, you had to. But if he didn’t live, he was liable to drag the whole patrol down in ruin with him.
Very close by, a jay jeered. The guide froze. So did all the men from Plegmund’s Brigade. That raucous cry made an even better signal than a wolfs howl. The Algarvian lieutenant took another couple of steps before realizing something might be wrong. He looked around wildly, his stick at the ready.
But then Sidroc spotted the bird, pinkish brown with a black tail, fluttering from one pine to another. As it flew, it screeched again. He breathed easier. “It’s a real jay,” he said.
“Nice to know something’s real,” Werferth said. Nobody argued with him.
The Algarvian lieutenant laughed and said, “If any Unkerlanters heard it, they probably started shivering, thinking it was us.” Sidroc nodded. The lieutenant was likely to be right. Swemmel’s men alarmed Sidroc, but he’d seen that Mezentio’s men alarmed the Unkerlanters, too. That was fortunate, as far as he was concerned. Every so often, it kept the enemy from pressing an attack as hard as he might have.
“Forward,” the young lieutenant said. Sidroc had heard the word too many times—mostly shouted, and emphasized by shrilling whistles—for it to spur him on as it had when he’d first joined Plegmund’s Brigade. What was it but an invitation to get himself killed? Even the redhead seemed to realize as much, for he spoke quietly, as if to say the patrol needed to go on but shouldn’t make a fuss about it.
Even though that jay had been real, Unkerlanters lurked among the trees. Sidroc could feel their presence even if he couldn’t see or hear or smell them. The hair on his arms and at the back of his neck kept trying to prickle up. He was almost panting, as if he’d run a long way. But it wasn’t exhaustion that had done it to him: it was nerves. He felt taut as a viol string about to snap.
Beside him, Ceorl started cursing under his breath: harsh, monotonous, vicious cursing, all in a tiny voice no one farther away than Sidroc could have heard. “You know they’re there, too, eh?” Sidroc whispered. Ceorl looked astonished, as if he hadn’t realized what he was doing. Maybe he hadn’t. He nodded abruptly and went back to his oaths.
“Clearing,” the guide said, first in his own language, then in Algarvian. The Unkerlanter word sounded like one that meant
market square
in Forthwegian, so Sidroc supposed he understood the fellow twice.
“Well, go on across it,” the young lieutenant said. “We’ll follow.” That made good sense. Unkerlanter soldiers were far less likely to blaze a peasant than soldiers in the uniforms of their foes. Even so, the guide gave the redhead a look full of hate and fear as he started across the muddy open space. A couple of men at a time, the troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade followed.
The guide had got about halfway to the trees on the far side of the clearing when he trod on a cunningly buried egg. Afterwards, Sidroc realized that was what must have happened. At the time, all he knew was the sudden roar and flash of light as the sorcerous energies trapped in the egg suddenly released themselves, all channeled upward to be as deadly as possible. The luckless guide didn’t even have the chance to shriek. He simply ceased to be. One of his boots—probably not the one that had stepped on the egg—flew high into the air before thudding back to earth. That was the sole remaining sign he’d ever lived.
In automatic reflex, Sidroc started to throw himself flat. But he checked that reflex and stayed on his feet. He was liable to throw himself down on another egg, and to end as abruptly as the guide had done.
“Back!” the Algarvian lieutenant hissed, even more urgently than he’d ordered the advance not long before. He added, “Every Unkerlanter in the world is going to come see what happened here.”
That was bound to be true, and made a powerful incentive to retreat in a hurry. Again, though, Sidroc didn’t let himself be rushed. He tried to retrace his steps as exactly as he could. He hadn’t stepped on an egg as he went west into the clearing. If he was careful, he wouldn’t step on one going back east out of it.
He’d just slid behind a pale-barked birch when an Unkerlanter trooper in a rock-gray tunic stuck his head into the clearing. Sidroc whipped his stick up to his shoulder and blazed. The Unkerlanter toppled. Cries of alarm rang out from the woods on the other side of the open space.
“Nice blaze,” Sergeant Werferth said. “They won’t think we all ran for home with our tails between our legs.”
He was right: the Unkerlanters didn’t think that. Because they didn’t, their egg-tossers started lobbing eggs into the forest to try to keep the patrol from making its way back to the encampment. Sidroc had endured far heavier bombardments in the fight in the Durrwangen bulge. Realizing that also made him realize this peppering shouldn’t trouble him much—odds were, it would do him no harm.
Somehow, the comforting logic failed to comfort. Each bursting egg made him want to flee more than the one before. True, the fighting by Durrwangen had been far harsher. But Durrwangen had also been ten months before. Sidroc was ten months more battered, ten months more frazzled. He’d seen ten months’ more disasters. He’d had ten months more to realize how easily disaster might visit him.
An egg burst, not far away. Someone started screaming.
One more down,
he thought.
One more who signed up in Forthweg for a lark, or maybe to stay out of gaol.
He looked back in time, trying once more to recall his own reasons for joining Plegmund’s Brigade. With eggs bursting all around, with trees crashing down in front and behind, they didn’t seem good enough.
“We did our duty,” the young Algarvian officer said when they finally got back to the village from which they’d started. “We successfully developed the enemy’s position. Now that we know where he is, our counterattacks stand a better chance of driving him back.”
Sidroc didn’t want to think about counterattacks. He’d lived through another day. He was content—he was delighted—to savor that.
Captain Frigyes prowled along the muddy beach of Becsehely. “Be ready, men,” Istvan’s company commander urged. “You must always be ready. No telling when the Kuusamans are liable to descend on us.” He pointed to Ist-van. “You wish to say something, Sergeant?”
“Aye, sir.” Istvan nodded. “We’ve been hearing for months that the slanteyes would hit us, and they haven’t done it yet. Why should we figure this time is any different?”
“Because I say so would be reason enough,” Captain Frigyes answered, and Istvan winced. He’d meant no disrespect. But then Frigyes went on, “But there’s more to it than that. Our mages have stolen emanations from their crystals. They’re talking about Becsehely in ways they never have before. They’re serious this time, no doubt of it.”
“Ah.” Istvan nodded again. “Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome.” Frigyes pounded a fist into the palm of his other hand. “Are we going to lick those goat-eating whoresons when they try to take this island away from us?”
“Aye!” most of the men in the company roared. Istvan had to roar, too. So did Corporal Kun and Szonyi and a few other soldiers. Each of them bore an identical scar on his left hand: a remnant of the purification and penance Captain Tivadar, Frigyes’ predecessor, had inflicted on them for inadvertently eating goat from a captured Unkerlanter stewpot. Tivadar was dead. Only the men who’d committed the sin—deadly, by Gyongyosian standards—knew of it these days. But a cry like Frigyes’ still made Istvan sweat cold for fear he’d be discovered.